Remember that great game, Bioshock, where billionaire libertarian Andrew Ryan built an underwater city because he was tired of government interference, and it worked out really well for him, and it totally didn’t turn into a nightmarish leaking hellpit filled with screeching, drug-addled lunatics?

Well, we’re inching closer to that beautiful reality, as billionaire PayPal founder and libertarian Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute, a group determined to build their own underwater city! (Technically, they plan to build their city above the ocean, but since they’ll be operating in international waters, free from the pesky, invasive government building codes, their city will be at the bottom of the ocean soon enough.)

I wouldn’t go requesting vacation days yet, but kotaku is reporting that Spore has announced a release date of September 7, 2008. I’d link to the actual Spore site with the announcement but their site is all Flashy and shitty and annoying and crashed my browser once and it’s slow and I hate it and I’m on a crummy laptop right now with a bad connection at work.

We watched a great documentary this weekend called The King of Kong, which is about dorks fighting for the high score in the Donkey Kong arcade game. Funny, surprisingly gripping and even moving, though, like most documentaries, it was perhaps a little manipulative and one-sided.

Still, a great film even if you’re not into gaming, and once you’ve watched it, you can search the web for all the controversy it’s generated.

At first blush, it looks like a TF2 ripoff. Look at that guy. He looks like they took the TF2 heavy, stuck the TF2 soldier’s helmet on him, and crammed the TF2 spy’s cigarette in his mouth. What, no eyepatch?

Art design aside, it’s a 3rd person multiplayer shooter and it’s apparently going to be free, supported by “advertising and micro-transactions”, which I assume means in-game ads and the ability to buy upgrades and character tweaks (ah, there’s the eyepatch!).

Idea to do a cartoon Battlefield dates back to Battlefield 1942, Lars Gustavsson envisioned something like BFH

Okay! Easy! Actually, If you really read the details, it doesn’t sound like it’ll play much like TF2 at all, it just looks like the current art design maybe takes a cue from TF2. (Not that I can point fingers — I’m outright stealing TF2’s art for my comic.) At any rate, I’m not much of a fan of 3rd person shooters, but it’s still something to keep your eye on, especially the fan reaction.